The Peace Treaty and the Rhine

The Canadian Forum/Editorial/1920-10

The Peace Treaty and the Rhine written by E. H. Blake

The Rise of Co-operation in Canada

From The Canadian Forum

During the night of November 10th, 1918, two special trains lay quietly on a secluded siding in northern France. One was the train of the Commander-in-Chief of the allied armies on the western front; the other had brought the delegates of the newly formed German republic. Inside Marshal Foch's train, in a brightly lighted saloon-carriage, a group of tired men, whose faces shone white above their gold and decorations, discussed with the little party of black-coated civilians from Germany the terms upon which the allied powers were willing to suspend hostilities. About four o'clock in the morning a document was signed; and the Germans were escorted back to the train that was waiting to carry them home to the defeated Fatherland. The document was the agreement for an armistice, and the scene in Marshal Foch's saloon-carriage was the first act in the great drama of the Carthaginian peace.

The war had been won on the western front, and it was on the western front that Marshal Foch sought his principal guarantees. So, as the primary condition of the armistice, the German armies were required to withdraw to a line roughly forty kilometers behind the Rhine. The country so evacuated was then occupied by allied troops as far as the Rhine and thirty kilometers beyond it at the three great bridgeheads of Mayence, Coblenz, and Cologne. The intervening territory between the eastern bank of the river and the new German line — which ran parallel to, but ten kilometers beyond the apex of the bridgeheads — was formed into a neutral zone, forbidden to the troops of either power. The Rhineland thus became a hostage for Germany's good behaviour, and the allies secured a strategic line unsurpassed either for defence or aggression. In their hands lay a rich industrial area; in front of them, a long strip of undefended territory; and beyond that again, the now virtually defenceless enemy. The conditions were adequate; very thoroughly, within the limits assigned to him, Marshal Foch had completed his task.

Even during the early weeks of the occupation, the differences between the administrations of the various allies became sharply defined. The British and Americans seem, on the whole, to have governed their areas in a just and tolerant manner. If they did not actually seek to mitigate the hardships inseparable from a military occupation, at least they did not aggravate them. On the other hand all the evidence points to the French and Belgians having behaved harshly and provocatively. "The Englishman is anxious to be respected", wrote a prominent German of this phase of the occupation, "but the Frenchman demands admiration". Whatever the truth of this generalization, it was the Englishman who was admired, while the Frenchman succeeded only in inspiring fear and distrust. Of course there were exceptions; but there can be no doubt that conditions in the occupied territories varied between the extremes of tolerance on the one hand, and excessive harshness on the other. Taking these conditions at their best, however, they were far from being easy or agreeable. Everywhere martial law was strictly enforced; and the liberty of the inhabitants, apart even from such minor regulations as those requiring the saluting of allied officers, was necessarily interfered with seriously in many ways. Freedom of trade, there was none; a rigorous censorship prevailed; the blockade was still at its height. Moreover industry was paralyzed; unemployment was general; and, in spite of the superficial air of prosperity among the shopkeeping classes who supplied the minor wants of the allied troops, destitution was widespread. Add to all this the general sense of defeat and revolution, of humiliation and apprehension, and it will be realized that the lot of the inhabitants of the Rhineland was not an enviable one. On the whole, however, it was no worse than they could have expected; and from a material point of view it was certainly better than that of the rest of Germany; for an army of occupation brings with it clothes and food, and some of these even a conquered people will secure.

While these problems of the occupation were adjusting themselves slowly and often painfully on the Rhine, events of vastly greater importance, not only to the Rhineland, but to the whole of Germany, were unfolding themselves amid the mists of jealousy and strife that enshrouded the peace conference at Paris, where the second act of the drama was being staged. At Paris the bright sun of idealism that had inspired the allied peoples during four years of war was already undergoing an eclipse; many of the allied statesmen had ceased even to pay lip-service to those ideals; the men who controlled French policy had openly repudiated them. These men regarded the occupation of the Rhineland not merely as a guarantee against German aggression, but as a prize that France, having once secured, should do her utmost to retain. To them the fourteen points were simply a piece of foolish sentiment; the project for a league of nations, a dangerous chimera. They strove not to end war but to make France strong; and to this end they were ready to ignore all the ethnological and political obstacles — all the possibilities of future war — that would be involved in an annexation of the Rhineland. So Clemenceau and Foch, without faith in that new world of which so much had been heard during the war, set themselves the task of establishing France's frontier on the Rhine. What, in November 1918, had [p.6] been a legitimate military precaution, was now advanced as a pretext for violating many of the ideals for which the allies had always professed to be fighting. The struggle for the Rhineland became a struggle for the soul of the allied nations. Both contests ended in a compromise. Only by conceding, in part, the French claims to the Rhine could the British and Americans secure M. Clemenceau's sceptical support for even a modified league of nations. So the compact was made; and instead of annexation, it was agreed that the occupation should be continued for fifteen years as a pledge for the fulfillment of all the treaty obligations (including the payment of the indemnity), and that this period might be extended at will in the event of any breach or default. A few days later these concessions were whittled down further, when Foch's plan for a thorough-going military administration was rejected in favour of government by a civilian commission. Defeated in their more extreme claims, the French militarists then set about fostering an agitation for an independent Rhineland republic. But they gained no support; and in the end M. Clemenceau had to content himself with building up a chain of minor reactionary powers in the east — his cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism.

For the occupied territory itself, the change in administration that followed the signing of peace was, on the whole, an improvement. For one thing the size of the army of occupation was at once reduced. Notwithstanding the protests of the Northcliffe press, the British retained a force of only about 14,000; the French retained 95,000, the Belgians 20,000, and the Americans less than 16,000. (And when one remembers that the cost to Germany of maintaining the British force alone up to May of this year amounted to £45,000,000, it will be realized that any reduction in numbers was of vital importance.) But not only was the size of the army reduced, its powers were curtailed. The Rhineland Commission took charge of administration, and martial law was, nominally at any rate discontinued. Moreover the blockade was partially raised, and some of the restrictions on trade were removed. Even then, however, the occupied territories showed no signs of returning to a decent standard of life, let alone their former prosperity. Industry was still dislocated; unemployment, very widespread; and the supply of foodstuffs, only slightly improved. Finally for a temporary occupation, there had been substituted the greater humiliation of a prolonged one; and, in practice, the methods of the civilian commission proved hardly less arbitrary than those of the military authorities.

Thus the curtain dropped on the second act of the Carthaginian peace. The reactionaries had gained an incomplete but still substantial victory. The fourteen points had, in all but form, been swept aside; self-determination had become a new catchword for the old diplomacy; the league of nations, but the empty husk of a great ideal. The new order that was to have been constructed from finer, fresher materials had in fact been rebuilt out of the rubble and refuse of the old. Men looked in vain for the promised era of peace and reform that was to have risen miraculously from the vast ruin and waste of war. Instead they saw a Europe destitute and distracted, swayed by revolution in the east, by reaction in the west. And in this new Europe of blockades and cordons and minor wars, of starvation and unrest, the German republic led a precarious, isolated existence. Lord Northcliffe and the French militarists had tired (as one writer put it) of feeding off the carcass of Prussianism; for the moment they were occupied almost exclusively with Bolshevism; and so, but for an occasional kick, the struggling Government of Germany was for the time forgotten. Then unexpectedly, there began a series of events that again fastened men's minds on Germany and particularly on the Rhineland.

Early in the present year Mr. Lloyd George, under pressure from the French, decided to redeem one of his regretted election pledges; and in February the Supreme Council demanded the surrender of the war criminals. Eight hundred officers, including nearly all the higher commanders, some guilty no doubt of atrocious crimes, but many who had acted simply in accordance with accepted military standards, were to be arrested by the already harassed German government and handed over metaphorically if not literally in chains to make an allied triumph. The accusers were to create "ad hoc" offences to fit each case; they were to supply the judge and the jury in the shape of an allied court martial; they were to determine the venue. The German government, as it was bound to do if it still cherished any hopes of remaining in power, protested; and the suprerne council was forced into a discreditable compromise that did nothing to improve the relations between France and England. In Germany itself, even though the government had gained a partial success, the incident had proved too great a strain on its declining strength; and a few weeks later, towards the end of March, a counter-revolution, organized by officers of the old regular army, broke out in Berlin. The government, deserted by the very soldiers upon whom it had relied for support, fled to Stuttgart; and it was Labour, using the weapon of the general strike, that suppressed the revolution. Yet, as the sequel shows, even this warning of a reviving militarism was not sufficient to bring Lord Northcliffe and the wild men of Paris journalism to their senses; for their next action was to constitute a still more serious menace to the moderate government of Germany.

Although it was the novel weapon of the general strike that had really defeated the Kapp-Luttwitz Putsch in many places armed bodies of workers had come into actual conflict with the reactionary [p. 7] troops; and it was in the coalfields and industrial towns of the Ruhr valley, which lay partly in the northern portion of the neutral zone beyond the Rhine, that the most severe fighting had taken place. Among the workers of the Ruhr were a large number of convinced communists, members of the Spartacus party that had attempted to set up a soviet government shortly after the armistice; and these red workers had organized under Major von Behrfeld, an able officer of the old general staff now turned communist, to resist the reaction. Once the danger was past, the more moderate elements, who had been co-operating with them, wished to disperse, but the communists — partly through fear of reprisals from the regular troops, and partly because they considered the time propitious — determined to establish their own government. Now the forces that the Berlin government had been permitted by the allies to maintain in the Ruhr proved too weak to suppress the Reds; so the leaders in Berlin, now restored to a precarious authority after their ignominious flight, appealed to the French government for permission to employ additional troops. Whether at this juncture the French government consulted the other allies has never been revealed; however, while the negotiations were still in progress, the German commander on the borders of the Ruhr district, probably with the deliberate intention of embarassing the republican government — for he acted contrary to explicit instructions from Berlin — entered the Ruhr with a force of Reichswehr, and proceeded with great severity to suppress the red army; whereupon France without waiting to consult her allies further — if indeed she had consulted them at all — took advantage of this technical breach of the treaty to advance troops into a perfectly peaceful part of the neutral zone a hundred miles further south, and occupy the cities of Frankfort, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Dieburg, ostensibly as a pledge for the withdrawal of the Reichswehr from the Ruhr.

The reasons advanced by the French government for this act were entirely disingenuous. Obviously France had more to fear from a red government in the Ruhr (to which she looked for a considerable part of her coal tribute) than from the harassed republican government of Germany. To maintain, as some of their apologists did, that the rulers of France — the bitterest opponents of Bolshevism — were shocked by the harshness with which Bolshevism was being suppressed in the Ruhr was ridiculous. Equally unconvincing was the suggestion that the German government intended permanently to occupy the neutral zone, and that the action of the French government was designed simply to prevent so flagrant a breach of the treaty. The truth was that the French government, disappointed in the matter of the war criminals, alarmed by the tendency of public opinion in England towards a revision of the treaty, and completely misled by the Northcliffe press, had become convinced that all that was needed to cement the entente afresh, to stiffen England's attitude, and to speed up delivery of the coal tribute, was just such an abrupt, threatening gesture as the occupation of Frankfort and the other Hessian towns. They were gravely mistaken; for when, having completed their move, they called upon the English government for co-operation, they were met with a definite refusal, and reminded that in attempting to force the hands of the other allies by independent action, they had themselves broken the treaty. Something like a crisis ensued; but Mr. Lloyd George, realizing that, for the moment at any rate, the policy of revenge was played out, stood firm; and within two weeks the French troops were withdrawn.

Unfortunately, however, the straining of the relations between France and England was not the only untoward incident of this excursion. For one thing, the force employed had been largely composed of Sengalese, and this in itself caused much protest in England. When it was reported however that the municipal authorities in the occupied towns had been forced by the French generals to organize brothels for these half-savage negroes, and that, in spite of this precaution, offences against the persons' of inhabitants had been numerous, the general feeling in England amounted almost to disgust. Moreover it soon became known that the French officers had done everything they could to humiliate and provoke the people of these, not Prussian, but liberal German cities. Tanks rumbled through the peaceful streets of Frankfort, aeroplanes circled overhead, and machine-guns were mounted at all the principal corners. One of these, manned by black troops, opened fire without reason upon an orderly crowd in the main square. By the time the surprised, terrified people had scattered, over forty dead and wounded lay on the pavement. At Frankfort, too, the house in which Goethe had been born, now a museum containing many personal relics and documents — sacred not only to Germans but to educated men of all countries — was deliberately selected by the French authorities as a billet for a party of Sengalese. It looks almost as if the French militarists had been striving to emulate the Prussian.

Although no grave consequences followed the episode of the Ruhr, it must be remembered that every unnecessary blow at the shaken German government destroys the hope of many moderate men in Germany and drives them into the arms of either the militarist or the communist. By all means let us be firm with Germany, but let our policy be consistent with our professed ideals; or, if our ideals are only propaganda, at least let it be consistent with common sense. We all professed to desire the destruction of Prussian militarism; we all profess an abhorrence of Bolshevism. Yet to one extreme or the other, not [p.8] only Germany but many European countries are being driven by the provocative policy of the French government. Sane men of all countries are coming to realize that even the most fundamental of the objects for which we fought are slipping from our grasp in the midst of the wars and hatreds and contentions that still rock Europe. If the French militarists are to continue to dictate the lines of the European resettlement, the next great war is within measurable distance. It may be a war with a coalition of European powers more reactionary than our own; it may be a war — a full-dress war — against Bolshevism. The only alternative is to change the treaty of Versailles and the men who made it, and to take up again the task of European resettlement, not in the spirit that our leaders have caught from our former enemies, but in the spirit that inspired the people of the allied nations through the trials and disasters and successes of four years of war.

E. H. Blake